Chameleon
Chameleon was Criterion's flagship engine for Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, a modified version of it would then power their following title Need for Speed: Most Wanted (2012).Need for Speed on Twitter: "It's an evolved engine" History "Chameleon: that's what it's called. The reason being we got to the point where we realised we had all these technologies and they're fantastic building blocks and we basically reserve the right not to have this fixed engine that you're always constrained by." — Alex Fry While Criterion may be at the heart of this classic Need for Speed, it's been revamped to our times (as of 2010) - it is no Burnout Paradise clone; rather a spiritual successor in terms of technicality. To elaborate, a brand new engine came into fruition for this entry that differed from their previous titles, in regards to the physics system and graphical capabilities, while other under the hood things from Paradise were re-engineered or built upon. Regardless, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit was reborn. Burnout Paradise Post Mortem "There was a lot of copy and paste from Paradise code where that code was good enough. Whether it's a new engine or not, it's at least a version 2.0 of the Paradise engine, not a 1.1." — Richard ParrTech Interview: Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit The threading model is entirely new, being the biggest change moving forward with Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit (2010). Previously, in comparison, Paradise was dual threaded, which utilized update and render threads. However, for several reasons this was dropped and the team decided on one thread. One of those reasons being that Criterion wanted a 30hz game that not only looked excellent, but had little controller latency. An extra thread would've only added latency issues, which is where the single threaded method came into play. Also, the architecture of the engine was new, and all about how the game modules communicated with another. Basing all of these new instances upon experience and knowledge Criterion learned, the ideas behind Paradise were implemented differently this time around - that sums up the new engine; unique to their newfound philosophy. Research & Development Criterion didn't start on Chameleon until the mid year of 2009, only bits and pieces as they had much to fix until going until full force on it. The new version of the asset management database being one of the first things to work on. Alex Fry did look into lighting and gamma correct rendering further, and later on the team as a whole did prototype new elements of the engine as well - though it was never implemented post launch with things such as the dlc as that would require overhauling things as a whole.Tech Interview: Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit • Page 4 Richard Parr has explained they never explicitly research things, being more fond of development time instead. That's where specialists come in, such as those working on the asset management database and build processes, so it takes 30 minutes or so to take all assets out of the database and munge it into a disc that people can play on three platforms. In comparison, for Burnout Revenge it was eight hours to build a disc on one platform and you could run it overnight. When starting the new engine they knew what the best architecture would be to suit all three platforms so they did that architecture and then pulled across a lot of the other lines of code that made sense. Shortly confirming that did take some of the work that had been done on Burnout Paradise PC. Things like arbitrary resolutions on monitors, bizarre controllers and stuff like that we had in their minds from the beginning whereas some of the guys who worked on Paradise on the PC had to crowbar that into what they'd already done, which doesn't always go well. Graphics Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit uses fully deferred lighting. However, Alex Fry then states that the engine is more a hybrid, using deferred and forward rendering in situations that make sense; explaining some of the demands they had for the world which were huge expansive vistas with lots and lots and lots of lights and lots and lots and lots of trees and alpha... the deferred rendering made more sense as they can combine more of the full-screen operations into a single full-screen pass, they don't have to pay for any overdraw. So for that particular operation the deferred renderer makes sense. They went for full high dynamic range with filmic tone-mapping and the rest but had this requirement that you can't really miss with a Need for Speed game which is that the cars are the stars. The cars are absolutely the stars of the show. We had to have the best-looking, smoothest, curved to the paint, minute details, totally authentic cars with phenomenal lighting... we had to have all of that. Rendering Techniques "It's all totally real-time and it's one of the things we're most pleased about with this game: the cars had to look amazing at all times of the day, anywhere in that world. Image-based lighting then... it means that the cars light themselves based on the image around them." — Alex FryTech Interview: Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit • Page 2 The cars are using a forward renderer. They're part of the hybrid. They still have a huge amount of lights attached but one of the greatest strengths of the car is that they use image-based lighting. Image-based lighting essentially means that the cars are lit by the image of the environment around them. So if you put that car anywhere in the world, it will be lit correctly. You haven't got to fake it, you haven't got to bake it. The cars are real-time image-based lit. That's one of the reasons they look good. When driving into a tunnel they don't have to place any probes to capture some light here, capture some light there, it's all dynamic. So when driving into a tunnel, one can start to see the car get dark at the front while remaining bright at the back. Drive into the tunnel and the light will roll over, and then go underneath some spotlights in the tunnel and one can see beautiful specular soft lights roll over the car. You'll get to the open side and one side of the car will start to roll into the light and you'll see all these different frequencies like the really sharp reflection of the lacquer over the top to this sort of blurred diffuse underlying paint beneath it and you'll see all of these different layers building themselves up. The engine is three to four times more powerful than Burnout Paradise's in terms of the rendering side of things. Tools "This whole workflow is a game-changer, and so that's what it's called, the asset database is called Game Changer." — Alex FryTech Interview: Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit • Page 3 Similar to the run-time it's version 2.0 of the tools. With Paradise they built this thing around an asset database of their own so they could have this big world that wasn't an enormous file, it's a database full of bits of world. They took that idea, hugely improved the backend database so it's orders of magnitude faster and generally a lot more reliable. The old asset manager was called Game Explorer. This is a complete rewrite of what they learned. It's about a hundred times faster. They've got over a quarter of a million parts that make up the game in this database. It's a relational database but it's fully branchable and fully version controlled. The guys that wrote it aren't aware of anything like it that exists. There might well be one but we've not read about it. We can just build a new part off for a demo, we can build new parts and branch them back, we've got history and everything. It's all totally relational so they can find what's connected to whatever else so we know that this texture is attached to this bit of world and that bit of world, this animation is applied to that... It's fully traceable so they can traverse the game world up and down. That was all-new for this. It's all live-updatable so you can slide sliders and move light placements or right click and update a texture, it's all live and you can connect to multiple consoles at once and do it all there. Gallery GameChanger5.png|Seamless transition to the game inside Game Changer. GameChanger6.png|Another peek from Game Changer. PhysicsEditor2.png|Overviewing the physics of Need for Speed: Most Wanted (2012). Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit (2010) HP2010-Duel.jpg|Exotic rides, vast vistas. HP2010-HighwayDrift.png|Extensive physics that drift even the world's fastest vehicles. HP2010-F1Pursuit.jpg|Night lights, hot pursuit. Need for Speed: Most Wanted (2012) NFSMW12-4kNightShot.jpg|4k night visuals. NFSMW12-DLCCars.jpg|DLC vehicles. NFSMW12-OGBeta.png|A beta build with debug text displaying the engine's scripting language. Videos File:Need_for_Speed_Most_Wanted!_Inside_Criterion_Games_-_The_Downshift_Episode_40 Sources Category:Need for Speed Category:Criterion Games Category:Racing Engine Category:Engines Category:Original Research Category:Racing Category:Racers